


Bad Luck and Broken Bones

by Undomiel5



Series: Servare Vitas [2]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV), Numb3rs (TV), Original Work
Genre: F/M, FBI Hostage Rescue Team, Gen, Mishaps, Serious Injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 08:46:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17721956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Undomiel5/pseuds/Undomiel5
Summary: December 2006. The scream, when it came, chilled him to the bone, and he flinched like he had been stuck. It was a scream he would remember for the rest of his life, a scream, a howl of surprise and agony at a pitch that sounded like nails on a chalkboard. Only one person had a voice that high: Asha.





	Bad Luck and Broken Bones

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV. All medical mistakes are my own. I have tried to describe what makes sense based on some online reading and on common sense. Any suggestions/corrections are welcome.
> 
> Please review.

Rain

Lots of rain

Rain everywhere

 _Cold, icy_ rain everywhere.

Rain in her hair; rain soaking her clothes; rain dripping down her forehead, trickling down into her eyes; rain turning the ground beneath her into mud; rain everywhere.

At that moment, lying in what had once been a grassy field and what was now a mud field under a torrential downpour, Asha Hunter was quite convinced that if she never saw rain again for a very long time, if ever, it would be too soon. Her eyes were stinging with the constant dripping water. She was cold and soaked to the bone. Shivers periodically racked her lithe frame. She was miserable, but she had a job to do that, she hoped, would be done soon, and until it was done, she wouldn’t move.

Asha kept her eye fixed to the lens, her trigger finger resting on the trigger guard of her sniper rifle. Through her high-powered scope, she could see several of her teammates marching their cuffed target towards a police van that would transport him back to the city. The date was December 30, 2006, or maybe the 31st. HRT’s Red Team had been called up the previous day, two days until they went off of rotation, to execute a high risk warrant in the middle of nowhere Idaho.

To add insult to injury, the flu—the actual flu, not the stomach flu—had cut a swath through all of HRT the previous week. In Red Team alone, Henry Foster and Thomas Foster, Red Team’s two other snipers beside Asha and Benjamin Casberg (a former Marine sniper), had both gone down. To top that off, 6 members of the assault team were also sick as the proverbial dogs, leaving Red Team short-staffed for a high-risk mission with not enough warning to call in extras from Gold or Blue.

Asha blinked rapidly, trying to get the water that was blurring her vision out of her eyes. She shivered again for the gazilonith time in the last few minutes. Over her earpiece—she spared a passing thought for how it hadn’t shorted out with her being out in the rain for how many hours (she’d lost track, not even sure what insane hour of the evening (morning?) it was by then)—she heard one of her teammates let out a muffled curse as he slipped and nearly fell in the mud.

Finally public enemy #1 (for this mission) was safely in the police van, and Dan’s most-welcome voice suddenly was in her ear, “All members, recall. Come in before you freeze.”

“Or melt…” Asha replied, pushing herself up on cold-numbed limbs and shaking the pins and needles from her appendages.

“Hot drinks are waiting for everyone courtesy of the local LEOs.” That was Connor’s voice.

Asha packed up her equipment, all the while listening to the bantering of her teammates across the radio. The pressure was off. The mission was done. Now they could pack up and go someplace where it was dry and then go home.

Pulling out a red light from her small pack, Asha started back across the muddy field towards where her team and the local LEOs had set up shop. The walk was long. She had been forced to hike nearly a mile to a spot that would give her a clear sightline and maximum coverage when there were only two snipers to cover the whole scene.

Asha walked, and she walked, and she walked, one foot in front of the other. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been so cold or so tired. She was soaked to the bone and running on only a few hours of sleep in the last 2 days.

The wide red beam of her flashlight highlighted a deep ditch in front of her that she had to cross to get back to her team. It was at least ten or twelve feet deep with steep sides and a thick layer of soggy, disgusting leaves at the bottom.

Asha scrambled down the sides, slipping and sliding, but someone she managed to keep to her feet. She planted one foot in the leaves…

A snap of a metal spring activating cut through the night air.

A scream of pain followed.

* * *

Dan Torre liked his job. Usually. He was quite convinced that he had the best team in the world, and most of the year he would say the same about his job. But getting called up days after Christmas, getting called away from his wife and children just days before his team was due to go off rotation did not endear his job to him. Everyone knew that they could get called up at any time, but they had been hoping to quietly ride out the rest of their rotation, especially since they were down almost 33% because of the flu.

He was very glad to give the recall order, especially for the sake of his snipers. His team had been in the field for over 24 hours. It was quite cold—if it were much above freezing, he would be surprised—and it had been raining almost the entire time. The assault team had had some shelter and had been able to move about to keep warm, but his snipers had been out in the open the entire time, lying still keeping over-watch. If they didn’t have hypothermia yet or colds or the flu or something else or get any of those things soon, he was going to be surprised. In many ways, the snipers were some of the most vulnerable members of the team.

Dan heard his men bickering good-naturedly as they packed up their gear and started trailing back down to the temporary encampment to prepare to return to town. Casberg, the other sniper besides Asha, was grumbling about the rain. He didn’t mind the cold, he said, but after his time in Afghanistan he hated this much rain. Asha, after her acknowledgement of the recall order and her grumble about melting from the rain, had been, as usual, silent. She liked listening to the back-and-forth over the coms but rarely inserted herself.

Minutes ticked by slowly. His team continued to trickle back one by one, gratefully taking steaming cups of coffee from the local LEOs. Dan ticked their names off the mental list in his head.

The scream, when it came, chilled him to the bone, and he flinched like he had been stuck. It was a scream he would remember for the rest of his life, a scream, a howl of surprise and agony at a pitch that sounded like nails on a chalkboard. Only one person had a voice that high: Asha.

Seconds later another cry came across the coms, this time a different voice.

Besides Asha, four other members of his team had not returned yet.

“Status report!” Dan barked, fear and worry turning his tone sharp and biting, “Now people!”

“All clear. No harm,” Ross—Dan’s second and right hand—spoke, “Aaron’s with me.”

Two off the list: just Asha, Casberg, and Suarez left.

There was a long silence. “Casberg, Hunter, Suarez, status now!” Dan barked again.

“I’m here, Boss,” Suarez replied after a moment, “No harm except to my boot that is stuck in this swamp.”

Two names left

No answer from either of snipers

Dan put the call out again and then a fourth time, and still no answer came. His heart was in his throat. _Please Lord_ , he prayed. He tried a fifth time. Deafening silence on the open channel was the only reply.

Grant, the team’s chief medic, appeared at his side, the fear in his eyes mirroring the fear in Dan’s heart. As medic, Grant knew what kind of injuries could draw that type of tortured scream from a human body, and none of the ways were good. They needed to find their missing team members and find them fast.

“Find them!” Dan barked, a command and permission both.

* * *

Finding the two missing snipers was easier said than done, complicated by the fact that both snipers had been heading back from their shooting positions so their current locations were unknown, but Red Team set to the task with a vengeance anyway.

The remaining members of Red Team, except for Dan and Martin Fleming, split up and started a grid search for their missing snipers They found a furious but uninjured Casberg within about 15 minutes. He had done a face plant into the mud when his boots had sunk deep into soggy turf and stuck fast, losing his com in the process. They dug their snarling, muddy teammate out of the mire, and one helped him back to camp, leaving the other searchers to join the search for Hunter.

It took much longer to find Hunter. They knew that she had been forced to travel much further away from ‘base camp’ to find a good position, leaving the searchers with much more ground to cover. Finally, at almost 3am in the morning, nearly an hour after contact was lost, Grant was traipsing wearily along the rim of a steep sided ditch, sweeping the ground ahead with his light, when he finally found her.

“I’ve got her,” Grant said, activating his com.

“That would be helpful if we knew where on earth you were,” came David Lawrence’s calm drawl in reply, “It’s black as pitch out here.” Lawrence had been with the FBI for over a decade but had only joined HRT 3 or 4 years before. Born in Texas, David was nearly unflappable and still had a thick Texas drawl, despite having not living in the South in years.

Grant pulled his pack full of medical supplies off his back and fished around in the dark for a moment until he could pull an emergency flare gun from an outside pocket. Loading it with quick but sure movements, Grant pulled the trigger. The flare burst high in the air, lighting the air with a brilliant red flame, before falling back towards the earth in a graceful arc and burning out.

As soon as several of his teammates acknowledged that they had spotted the flare and were heading towards him, Grant turned his attention back to his injured teammate. Hunter was lying at the bottom of the ditch. Looking down at her from the top of the slope with the aid of a flashlight, the medic could see her slumped on her side, her head lying limply on one arm and her lower legs, both awkwardly, painfully twisted in her fall, buried in the leaves that lined the bottom of the ditch. Her sniper rifle, hanging across her back by its carrying strap, was pinned half underneath her, its expensive, high-powered scope smushed into the ground.

She was deathly still.

There were no signs of movement.

Grant swept the banks of the ditch with his light, searching for a spot that he could scramble down. It took him several minutes before he found a good spot. Then, with his heart in his throat, Grant scrambled down the hill, not waiting for his teammates to catch up, slipping and sliding on the muddy, slippery grass. Somehow he managed to keep to his feet, and second later he was kneeling at her side, headless of the muck that stained his clothes and soaked his knees. Grant pressed two fingers to her throat and held his breath. He let out a sigh of utter relief when after a long moment he felt a slow, steady beat beneath his fingers.

Another flashlight appeared at the top of the slope.

“Grant!” It was Valentin’s voice, his usually non-existent accent coloring his words. Grant wondered how the Russian had arrived so quickly;

“Down here,” Grant shouted back, shading his eyes from the light, “I’ve got her. She’s alive but out cold.”

Valentin started to scramble down the slope, as more flashlights started appearing behind him.

“Watch yourself,” Grant shouted up, unslinging his pack from his back and fixing a light to his cap so he could have both hands free.

Valentin appeared at his sight, “Vhat can I do?”

“Get her rifle off her. Cut the strap if you have to do,” Grant said, starting to check Asha for injuries, “Where’s Matthäus?”

“A hundred yards or so back,” Valentin replied, before sticking a flashlight between his teeth and bending to his task.

Connor Ross, silhouetted by flashlight, appeared at the top of the slope, “What’s the situation, Grant?”

“Still checking,” Grant shouted back, “Send Matthäus down when he arrives, but keep the others up there until I know what took her down.”

Grant felt no lumps on Asha’s skull, and there were no obvious cuts or abrasions, no blood in her ears, nothing that indicated why she was out like a light. Her eyes, when he finally found his penlight, were equal and reactive to the light, though fairly dilated. He had just started running his hands down her arms to feel for breaks when Matthäus slid to stop a few feet away, grumbling under his breath in an unbroken string of German words, probably imprecations against the weather.

“No obvious head injury. Check her torso, while I check her legs.”

Valentin had removed her rifle, finally by cutting the strap with a long knife that he had drawn from a sheath on his leg, and had moved back out of the way to give the two medics room to work, while still remaining close enough to assist if necessary.

“No rib injuries. Belly’s clear,” said Matthäus, as Grant switched from checking Asha’s right leg to her left.

“Find some smelling salts then,” Grant snapped, “I need to know what’s wrong with her.”

His hand skimmed gently down her leg, checking for open wounds or lumps that would indicate a fracture. When he reached her ankle, Grant’s hands hit metal, and sticky blood coated his fingers.

“I need light,” Grant said, pushing leaves away from her leg so that he could see better.

Valentin shifted the beam of his light down to where Grant was working. The white beam revealed a rusty trap closed tightly around Asha’s ankle, about two inches below the top of her boot. Asha regained consciousness with a strangled, half-cry, half moan of agony as Grant tried to see how bad the damage was. Grant could make out the contours of her face in the light Matthäus was holding, could see the size of her pupils, and see the tears trickling down her face. Conscious but confused, she tried to move, mumbling something incoherently in Cheyenne. Valentin grabbed her right hand in his free hand and squeezed, trying to soothe her.

 “She’s going into shock,” said Matthäus, amidst his mutterings in German, “and she’s hypothermic. I’m not sure how much sense we’re going to get out of her.”

“I can’t see. I can’t see,” said Grant, his wet fingers struggling to keep a grip on his tools. He knew the damage that an animal trap could do to a human leg but couldn’t see how bad the damage to Asha’s leg was. “Valentin, ask her if she can move her foot.”

It took several minutes of coaxing, repeated questions, and long pauses before Valentin could make a confused and only-half conscious Asha understand the question, and another long minute before she responded in a language that Valentin actually understood.

“No, it hurts too much,” Valentin finally responded for her.

That response almost certainly meant, as Grant had already guessed, that Asha’s ankle was broken, but the question was how badly, into how many pieces. Grant had never worked with trap before, but he had heard about hunting injuries from them. Was the fracture simple or compound? Was the ankle shattered?

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he finally said, speaking his thoughts aloud, mainly to Matthäus, “I can’t work in these conditions, and we need to get this wound clean before it gets infected. To be safe, we’ll tie a tourniquet loosely above her ankle, pry the trap off, and wrap the wound tightly in gauze. Once we get her back to the trucks, we can treat and clean the wound the best we can on the way to the hospital. The rest we leave for the docs. Any objections?”

The rest of the time in the ditch and the retreat back to the trucks was a blur for all involved. Asha howled with pain as they pried the rusted trap off her leg and blacked out. Getting her back up the hill to their waiting teammates and a stretcher nearly ended in disaster when Matthäus fell, slipping in the mud, but finally they got her to the top, and they started for home.

* * *

Asha remembered only snippets of the rescue and the return to the trucks. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she could recall a feeling of extreme cold, the shivers that raced across her limbs, and the fiery bolts of pain that shot up her leg ever time the stretcher was jostled. She remembered the water trickling down her face and irritating her eyes. She remembered crying out once in agony and one of her teammates trying to soothe her.

When she awoke with a much greater level of coherency, she was lying in a hospital bed. She felt just a little floaty, which probably meant she was on the good stuff, but was reasonably with it. Valentin, an abandoned cheap paperback in his lap, was sitting in a chair next to her bed but appeared to have nodded off.

Asha closed her eyes and drifted off again. When she awoke for a second time, Valentin and Matthäus were both there. Valentin had returned to reading his book, and Matthäus was standing by the darkened window staring outside. With two blankets covering her, she finally felt warm again, and her ankle, encased in a cast, only ached slightly.

It took only moments for Valentin, hearing the change in the beeping of the cardiac monitor, to realize that she was awake.

“Asha!! How do you feel?” He asked. Matthäus turned with a start, hearing his teammate’s words.

“Better, I think,” Asha replied slowly, “Warmer and dryer, too.”

The others laughed. “We’re all enjoying that, too. The rain’s finally stopped,” said Matthäus, leaning on the edge of the bed a safe distance from her injured leg.

“How bad’s my ankle?” She asked, glancing up at the medic and then back at her leg.

“Simple fracture: you got lucky. No infection yet. Grant and I cleaned it out the best we could in the truck on the way to the hospital, and the docs are pumping you full of meds. You’re going to be off your leg for a bit, but it should heal cleanly. You’re going to have a nasty scar all around your ankle from the teeth of the trap, though.”

“Could care less about the scar,” Asha replied with a sigh of utter relief, “as long as I can still walk without a problem.” A crippled sniper was a contradiction in terms. “When can we get out of here?” Whether she was referring to the hospital, Idaho, or both was unclear.

“In the morning,” said Valentin.

At the look of confusion on Asha’s face—she wasn’t sure of the date or the time—Matthäus added, “It’s still the 31st, and…” he checked his watch, “it’s just past 10pm.”

The three talked quietly for a while longer, before Valentin and Matthäus left her to rest. It was strange, she thought, how she still felt tired after sleeping the day away. She tried to sleep again but, after starring at the ceiling for quite some time, found that she couldn’t actually go back to sleep. Asha hated having to spend the night in the hospital. Ever since her parents had died when she was a child, being in a hospital had always made her skin crawl. She did not even like visiting people in a hospital, even less being hospitalized herself.

Asha shifted slightly, trying to get more comfortable in the rather uncomfortable hospital bed without jostling her leg. One of the main things she missed on missions was her own bed. She closed her eyes again and tried to sleep, resisting the restless twitching of her hands that ached to do something. Asha didn’t mind staying indoors, though she preferred the outdoors, but hated having nothing to do. She was always reading a book or whittling or twirling a pencil or stripping/cleaning one of her guns. When she wasn’t asleep, she was always doing something.

Finally, she reached up and curled the fingers of her right hand around her wedding rings that hung on a double chain around her neck. Another reason she wanted to go home: she actually had someone to go home to this time: Ian Edgerton, her husband of just over a month.

* * *

Morning could not and did not come soon enough. Asha hated hospitals at the best of times, and today definitely was not a good day. Her team showed up to spring her about 9am. By the time she has managed to get dressed with a nurse’s help, gotten her pair of crutches adjusted to her height, received instructions and two bottles of medicine from the doctor, and been helped down to the SUV, her ankle was aching fiercely, and her temper was fraying.

“Gear’s already on the plane. Pilot’s just waiting for us to arrive, and we can leave immediately,” Valentin, who was driving the SUV Asha was in, said as she bucked herself in.

“About time this mission is over,” she replied, “before something else goes wrong.”

Asha leaned her head against the window and tried to get comfortable. The others in the car, after a glance at each other, in surprise at her grumpiness, started talking quietly about their plans for when they got home. After a few minutes of letting the conversation wash over her, Asha started patting the pockets of her cargo pants looking for her cellphone, which, now that she thought about it, had been missing from the bag of her belongs that the nurse who had helped her dress had brought her.

“Does anyone have my phone?” She asked.

“I’ve got it,” replied Grant, who was in the passenger’s seat up front. She heard him rummaging around in his bag, and then he passed her phone back to her, “I charged it for you last night.”

“Hey, thanks,” she said. Asha had just realized that she needed to call her husband. Since she could not exactly drive with a broken ankle, one of her teammates would have usually driven her home, but now that she was married—it still seemed a strange thing to say—she needed to call Ian instead.

Asha glanced at her watch as she started to dial. It was about 10am in Idaho, which meant it was about noon in DC. She pressed the phone to her ear and listened to it ring.

The phone rang. And rang. And rang. And rang. About the time she expected the voicemail to kick in, Ian finally picked up. “Edgerton,” was his brusque opening. He must not have seen his caller ID.

“Hey, Ian.”

“Asha,” Ian’s tone softened, “You headed back?”

“Yea, we’re on our way to the airport now. Flight should be about 5 hours.”

“I’ve been sent up to DC for the day, but I should be back at Quantico by the time you land.”

“Good,” Asha replied, starring out the window at the passing scenery, “because I need you to pick me up if you can.”

 “Your truck break again?” Ian asked with a chuckle. Asha drove an old 1992 Ford F-150 that her uncle had bought for her when she joined the FBI in 1995. The already-used truck, which some of her teammates had decried as a “bucket of bolts,” had worked well for six years or so but had been rather temperamental ever since she had joined HRT in 2001. These days, the truck did not work about as much as it did work, and Asha was fast coming to the conclusion that she was soon going to have to give in and buy a new truck, as much as she was attached to the old one.

“Surprisingly, no,” she replied, “it’s actually still working for now.”

There was a long pause, and for a moment Asha wondered if Ian was going to ask why she needed a pick up, but finally he said, “I’ll do my best. I’ll see you this evening.”

* * *

Somehow Asha managed to drift off on the plane. She awoke to a hand on her shoulder. Dan was leaning over her.

“We’re about to land,” he said quietly, “You need to buckle up.”

Asha gave a wan smile and scrubbed her hands across her eyes, “Yea, boss. Thanks.”

“…at least it’ll be warmer here,” Valentin was saying to one of her teammates.

“Almost any place is warmer than Idaho was,” Matthäus replied. The temperature had dropped precipitously the previous night. It had been just above freezing as they came to the end of their mission, but it had been in the 20s when they had left that morning.

“How much warmer is warmer?” Asha interjected.

“About 50,” Valentin shouted back. The large plane that HRT used was divided into two areas: a makeshift cargo hold in the back and seating for 30 operators in front in several rows. Asha had been helped to a seat in the front row of seats where there was more room to stretch out her leg and prop up her ankle. Valentin had ended up in the back row.

“50 degrees warmer than Idaho??”

“No, it’s supposed to be 50 or so at Quantico, or so the weather channel said before we left.”

 _That makes more sense_ , Asha thought to herself. It would have been rather strange for the temps to be around 70 at Quantico in January. 50 was a little warmer than usual, but not very odd.

The jolt as the plane landed on the tarmac sent a bolt of pain running up Asha’s leg, and she bit her lip to keep from yelping or muttering something she would regret.

“Rise and shine,” said Grant, coming over to bring her crutches and help her up as soon as the plane slowed to a stop.

“Must you be so cheerful?” Asha replied, with a sigh of annoyance.

Grant instantly sobered, “Feeling bad?” He asked.

“These seats are not comfortable by any stretch of the imagination,” Asha, with a helping hand, rose, balancing on one foot for just long enough to tuck her crutches under each arm, “I’m stiff, and I’m sore. My ankle hurts, and I’m exhausted. Yes, I’m feeling bad.”

After a moment, she gave a long sigh, “I’m sorry, Grant. I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

“It’s alright,” Grant said, patting her shoulder with his free hand. Once he had passed her crutches over, he had leaned over and grabbed her backpack. “None of us make good patients.”

Asha gave a tired half-smirk of agreement and then started to crutch toward the back of the plane where the cargo ramp was, which was already starting to lower. Valentin, who had already grabbed his own gear and Asha’s rife-case, fell into step beside them.

“What do you want done with your rifle?” He asked. “It’s going to need to be checked out thoroughly before you use it. I think you did a number on the scope when you fell, and that’s not even mentioning the water and the mud.”

“Of course!” Asha grumbled. “Just what I need. … Put it in the car with me. I’ll see if Ian can have a look at it.”

Asha looked around as the three stepped off the cargo ramp. It was dark outside, but there were a number of lights illuminating the landing strip and surrounding area, and Asha could make out Ian’s truck in the parking lot a safe distance from the runway and taxi way. Ian was standing, nonchalantly leaning against the hood of his truck, which he had left idling (she could hear the engine), the sound drifting across on the wind. His body was silhouetted by the headlights, but his face was in shadow.

The walk from the plane to the parking lot usually seemed short, but that evening, on crutches, the distance seemed interminably long. Asha had to stop half-way there to catch her breath, the lack-of-sleep from the previous days and the greater exertion necessary to use crutches combining to exhaust her quickly.

Valentin, who had grabbed Asha’s backpack from Grant half-way across to the parking lot, sped up, leaving Grant to keep pace beside Asha. She saw Valentin speak with Ian for a moment as he put her bag and gun case in the back seat and then head off to his own car with a jaunty wave back at her.

“… for your pills by now,” Grant was saying, Asha suddenly realized pulling her mind back to her companion, “You have the instructions from the doctor. Just take your pills; don’t do anything stupid; and you’ll be fine.”

“Bored stiff by the time I get back to work, maybe, but my leg’ll be good,” Asha drawled, internally snickering at Grant’s advice/instructions.

When they were almost to the car, Grant split off with a final pat on the shoulder and a “feel better.”

“You forgot a detail on the phone,” Ian said when they were within speaking distance with a glance at her cast.

Asha gave a sheepish half-smile, “Yea, you were busy, and I had an audience.”

“I’m not too busy for you,” was Ian’s simple reply. He straightened up from his slouch against the hood and went around to open the passenger door for Asha. Though he didn’t ask if she needed help and was not hovering, his keen gaze was focused on her, and Ian remained within lunge range if she started to stumble.

“What happened?” Ian asked, once they were both safely in the car and on their way home.

Asha, leaning her head against the window, seemed to have zoned out. Ian touched her wrist, and she jolted.

“You with me?” He asked.

Asha shook her head, as if she were trying to clear away the cobwebs, “Yea, just exhausted.”

“What happened to your leg?” Ian asked again.

“Had to cross a ditch. There was a trap hidden in the leaves. Never saw it.”

Ian winced. He knew the damage a trap could cause, especially a big one, though in all his years in the field, he had successfully avoided stepping in one despite a few close calls. “It must not have been a big one, then?”

“I don’t think it was, but I never saw it. Simple fracture, which should heal fine. The worst I’ll have is a nasty scar,” was her slow reply.

“You got lucky then.”

“I think it hurt worse than getting shot,” Asha replied with a shrug, absentmindedly rubbing a scar on her left shoulder from where she had been grazed by a bullet during one of her early missions with HRT, “but I am fortunate. It could have been worse. I made it back and in one piece, so I am content.”


End file.
